Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

Procol, live and well in
Canada

Mark Plummer in 'Melody
Maker', 1971

Click
the big clipping to read it

So you want to write for group and orchestra, huh? Get it on
with violins and cellos like never before?

Forget it brother, put down your Scripto, close your folio and
wait till next year when Procol Harum's live concert album comes
out. You'll learn a thing or two about how to bring, or better
still suck the energy a fifty-piece orchestra can give to rock
music.

Last week Procol were in Canada, nearing the end of another
Stateside tour and hustling with the forces that are always
there, ready to hit at rock bands with all their energy.

Invited by the young hip bearded general manager of the
Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Bob Hunka, to appear with the
orchestra and the strings and things, Gary Brooker and the rest
of Procol jumped at the idea – and their follow-up album to Broken
Barricades was on the way. At least on paper.

But the hustles began early, and first off Canadian
immigration and customs were ready with a big boot. An American
band had done a moonlight from their hotel a couple of days
before they arrived on Tuesday. It took time to get the band in,
and then customs decided to literally take their gear apart, so
rehearsals did not get off the ground until Wednesday morning. A
day before the concert, which had been sold out 12 days before.

The American musicians' union, of which all the orchestra are
members, were behaving funny too. Three hours rehearsing to the
dot is their gig, different rates for recording, and there's no
chance that the bearded union man playing oboe was going to let
Procol Harum get away even a minute extra.

Wednesday: in a sterile white room, down a short corridor from
the Edmonton University's Jubilee Hall, Wally Heider's portable
is all set to go. The control desk looks uneasy 2,000 miles from
Los Angeles, and the two 16-track recording machines go about
their business as the union men pop in and out of the makeshift
recording studio to check that nothing is going on tape. Man
there's a different scale of fees for recording, and don't forget
he is there for musicians!

Note rehearsals over, the 50 piece orchestra are going over
Brooker's arrangement of Salty Dog when five o'clock comes
up. Stop. The union man looks at his watch, puts down his oboe,
glares at the musicians who are still playing. They all stop, and
walk out of the hall. Just like that.

Luckily the De Camera Singers, a beautiful voiced 20 people
rolled into one, are loving the gig. But then they haven't got
Blue Beard gazing over them

Thursday morning everyone is up by eight, fighting vacuum
salesmen and lighting strip executives in the Holiday Inn
breakfast room. We're off to the Jubilee Hall to catch rehearsals
due to begin at ten.

At ten the orchestra are there, ready to play the music, Shine
On Brightly comes out first, and shows what a guitarist Dave
Ball is.

The orchestra are working harder at the notes now, but the
giant Killy Deyong PA pushed the group out beautifully leaving
the orchestra behind.

It's the last rehearsal before the concert and I'm assured
that by the evening the giant PA will be sorted. out and the
music will shine through. Back in the control room Wally Heider
– rarely recording anyone else these days – is
wrestling with his machines and trying to sort out a mike
connection that has broken down somewhere. And with near on a
hundred instruments out there – that is no easy gig.

On stage a roadie is fixing a car wing mirror to one of
drummer BJ Wilson's mike-stands so that he can see the conductor,
and get into counting time in an orthodox manner. That is one of
the hardest things when rock groups get together the classical
musicians. The rock people talk in hip phrases, solos and
sequences. The orchestra in bars, notes, and lettered references
on their scores. Just one small piece of timing needs to go out,
and the orchestra are going to get lost. If one of the band blows
something out on a normal gig the rest know how to contain that
mistake. You can't jive when there are 70 people slightly out of
tune with you though.

Three hours on, things are nearly there, but there are still
points that need to be worked on. Solos, especially (guitarist)
Dave Ball's, have to be contained in a certain number of bars and
even if the playing is steaming there can be no stretching out.
Rehearsals are over, but the union man allows a vote to determine
whether or not the orchestra wish to do another hour.

They vote in favour of staying on, and the air is so tense
you'd need a power drill to cut through the nerves that everybody
is feeling. Heider's sorted his end out, Gary Brooker looks
nervous as they finish on Salty Dog and the seagull tapes
that got messed up before happen this time.

The point that hits home with the band is that they are going
to have to sell 120,000 albums [sic]
to break even, and more rehearsal time is needed. All they need
to do is play a few notes out during the concert and the whole
recording is down the drain.

Back in the hotel over dinner, Gary Brooker talked to me about
the way things were going. And although to everyone else it
sounded fine, he was not too happy with the way things had been
going.

Procol have done just one gig with an orchestra before, and
that was three years ago in Stratford, Ontario. No-one was there
to record it that time, and when this chance came up, the first
thing Brooker wanted to do was get the concert down on four inch
tape.

'This concert is something I have always wanted to do. The
concert in Stratford was so frustrating we never even heard it.
If it is successful, then I want to do a few more. The next thing
is to try it in London with the Royal
Philharmonic,' said Gary.

'How difficult is it,' I asked him, 'to play with an orchestra
after the freedom that playing in a five piece band allows?'

'You have to modify your playing, there's not the freedom you
have when you're just with the band. It's all down to bars.'

One thing the concert has pushed Gary into thinking about
seriously is a tour from city to city working with orchestras.
Here though, another thing bites home very hard, and that is how
little people think of Procol in Britain. How we have turned our
backs on what must be one of the most original bands to have come
out of Britain, right from the beginning when they came out with A
Whiter Shade Of Pale on the one hand they have been
innovators, and on the other they have been spurned.

'I'd like to do a tour with an orchestra. Obviously not with
the same orchestra all the time, but say the Philadelphia
Symphony Orchestra, Chicago with theirs. I like the idea of doing
that, but we've never asked anybody if they would like to play
with us. They asked US to do the gig here, and the same at
Stratford. If someone could get that together then we'd do it.'

Brooker taught himself arranging, and that is one of the
reasons why his orchestrations work so well. Unlike other rock
and rollers let loose with an orchestra he has not tried to write
classical pieces, but used the extra instruments in much the same
way as bands overdub extra instrumentation in the studio.

'It's pretty much common-sense. I have a book that I found at
my father's, that I look at if I want to know the range of an
oboe and I know what each instrument sounds like.

'I think that is the way it should be, a total thing. It is
still not as perfect as it should be, but if I had year to sit
back and write then it would be. The orchestra complements what
we are playing; and they add a bit as well.

'I went to see the Deep Purple thing at the Albert Hall, we'd
done our bit at Stratford, I wanted to see how other bands
approached working with an orchestra, but their thing was so
unimaginative. Like maybe for five minutes of the time they were
playing together, what they lacked was material.'

One thing that I feel maybe holds Procol back, not so much in
the States where they are undoubtedly one of the most critically
acclaimed of all British groups, is their lack of a stage show.
They get up there and play music and little else, Brooker sits on
the left of the stage looking across at organist Chris Copping.
BJ Wilson looks pretty funky as he attacks his drums with great [sic], and Dave Ball adds a 'Monty Python'
touch: but there again new boy bass guitarist Alan Cartwright
just lays down a heavy bass.

'It gets a bit silly. All we are trying to do is have a good
time at a concert. We don't exactly get people dancing in the
aisles but we are not up there to educate people – which a
lot of so-called artistic groups are trying to do. It we don't go
down well it's because we weren't playing well enough, nothing
else.'

Dinner over, it was back to very tense recording studio back
stage at the Jubilee Hall, and not only the band felt nervous
about the show. Everybody who had got caught up in the show was
feeling butterflies, and by the time Chris Copping got out on
stage to play a short organ piece with the orchestra before the
Procol gig began there couldn't have been a steady hand back
stage.

Copping's piece, Albinoni Giazotto's Adagio in Sol Minor
didn't really happen. But it was a brave try at something that he
wanted to do. Unfortunately nerves hit hard, and as the piece
only lasted seven minutes it took him half that to really find
his feet and lose butterflies.

Opening with Conquistador both the orchestra and Procol
sounded very shaky, but the orchestra were coming through the PA
this time. And unless people had been there during rehearsals I
don't think they could have sensed it was far from perfect.

The most amazing thing with this number, hitting at Spain in a
way that transported one straight into the Madrid arena, was that
Brooker had finished the arrangements in jets on the way to
Edmonton. Later when the concert had finished the band came back
to redo the number, and second time round it sparkled so much
that the applause far drowned the opening appreciation.

Whaling Song [sic] that
followed was again a little shaky, but if any of the Brooker/Reid
songs are masterpieces this is the one. Somehow after hearing it
with an orchestra that caught every mood of the sea, I could
never get into it the same way without the piccolo, flute and
clarinet to bring in the calm day break after the orgasmic
orchestra and choir bringing to life the sea and the whales pain
in bring hunted.

From half way through Whaling Song [sic] onwards the confidence that was
missing came to light, the orchestra started to steam – what
does an orchestra do and how does one equate 50 people having a
ball in rock and roll terms. Simple Sister and Salty
Dog both hit those high spots again, showing more and more
what a writer Brooker is. His songs come to him at the piano
playing around with chord sequences, and it is here that he
outstrips the majority of writers in the rock idiom. At times the
lyrics are a little too much, but once you've met Keith Reid, who
struts around like a left-over from the romantic days now passed
they fall into place easily.

If Wally Heider managed to catch only a quarter of the buzz
that rocked out of that concert then Procol Harum have an album
on their hands that surely must go down as one of the most
magnificent recordings to come out of the rock age. The trouble
is that when people get hold [sic] I
hope they listen to it as a large rock and roll group and forget
that there is a symphony orchestra and choir there. You have to
approach it as simply a rock and roll group enlarged by 70
people, filling out and adding dimensions that get lost in live
performances.

Apart from the obvious recording success, the concert itself
was a bitch. Having been used to English audiences and their
'come on and show me' bit, it was lifting to be in amongst people
who obviously new [sic] music, and
understood that performers need response to get their best out of
themselves. It's very possible that the same show moved to London
would have been little more than just a gig, and I'm willing to
stick my neck out and say that without such an attentive,
responsive group of people in the Jubilee Hall it would not have
happened in the way it did.

Procol too, have gone on to a new strength now the band is a
five-piece, allowing Chris Copping to stay at the organ and not
have to keep swopping from Hammond to bass guitar.

The concert, before they ran through a couple of the numbers
again, and especially In Held 'Twas In I, a long
complicated piece that goes back to their first [sic] album, drew a standing ovation at the
end. So good was it, that even when they had run through three
numbers at the end again the audience was still with them.